I don't usually like voting party line but I'm voting party line this year. I'm on the edge of becoming an active campaigner for it too, but I know the limits of my own skills of persuasion (when I'm not being dishonest) and I don't think that going all aggro would be worth the cost.

But look, if you're gonna ask, my feeling is this: I don't really like the Democratic party. I don't feel that it really represents the interests of liberals, and it certainly doesn't represent the interests of social and sexual minorities, lip service or no. But this is just because of arrogance, not malice. The Dems don't have to actually represent anyone, really, because the only requirement for them is to maintain a RELATIVE level of integrity. If they can manage to not jizz on an intern's face, then they win, because the only check to their power is a screaming shitshow that only represents... well, deplorables.

So now for two reasons, the GOP needs to die. I mean this as literally as possible: The GOP, by which I mean the organization itself, needs to experience a complete and irrecoverable collapse that renders it completely unable to achieve any of its political goals and therefore unable, or at least very unlikely to receive funding. The two reasons for this are as above: The GOP is not in any way serving the majority of its members (and almost none of the ones that actually SHOULD be represented), and by its presence, the DNC is not in any way *motivated* to serve its members.

Despite my calls for the death of the de facto Conservative party, I consider this still an expression of my Centrist (and very far Right by the standards of this board) leanings. I don't bear any ill will towards the conscientious religious conservatives, the military and police, the "poorly educated" tradesmen or the socially isolated should-be-paranoids that all have had the bad judgement and/or luck of falling under the banner of a system that, quite frankly, would rather grind these people into pig feed than listen to their concerns. The death of the GOP would not be a punishment for these people, but a gift: a rare, once every few generations chance to bloodlessly change the entire culture of their leadership, and maybe, just maybe, resolve the tension between their elevated senses of integrity, and the total lack of integrity of the corporate interests they've wound up in bed with. Hopefully, this will involve telling the corporate interests to go shove a rabid camel spider up their asses.

Now, this scenario is a fantasy, but in this the year of 2016 where nothing it's business as usual any more, I believe it can happen. The key to it all is for the GOP to receive one massive, crippling beat down. And that beatdown needs to come with a message: This isn't just about Donald Trump, this isn't just about being scared because I don't fit into a really specific demographic. This is about YOUR SHITTY ORGANIZATION and YOUR SHITTY CULTURE that allowed Donald Trump to be nominated in the first place.

So yeah, I'm backing the Democratic Party all the way. Not because I like them all that much, but because I need, I really really need the GOP's failure to stop Clinton, to stop legalization, to stop tax hikes, to stop ANY of these things from happening to be complete. And I need everybody who can vote to join in, or it won't work. So I'll be voting full-on Democrat all the way down the ballot this year, and I hope you will too, and I hope you'll tell your friends about it, too.

Brent: While I'd love to see some soul-searching among the GOP (starting with, as I've said, Reince Priebus or his successor looking at a voting system besides first-past-the-post so that a candidate can't get the nomination with 45% of the vote), I just don't see a total down-ballot repudiation of the GOP happening. There are seats that are competitive; there are also seats that people said were going to be competitive that aren't. (John McCain: still up by 13 points.)

I've often said "Clinton won't win Arizona, and if she does it's going to be such a significant nationwide victory that Arizona doesn't matter." It's looking like I may have been wrong about the first part, but not the second. FiveThirtyEight's currently got her at 338.9 electoral votes (I'm not sure how that works, presumably there's a probability factor as McMullin and Johnson each have a fraction of a point); if she loses 11 of those then she's still going to be four dozen votes past clinching the electoral college.

She doesn't need my vote, and she's made that abundantly clear.

I read stories like "Chelsea Manning gets thrown in solitary for a week and nobody tells her lawyers," and there's something deeply wrong with that. Stuff like that is part of why I couldn't bring myself to vote for Obama in 2012 (though the breaking point was Holder abandoning his investigation into Arpaio), and it's part of why I can't bring myself to support Clinton. They haven't just continued Bush's policy of surveillance against the American people and retaliation against whistleblowers, they've expanded it. It was horrifying under Bush; it's still horrifying now.

And, as much as I'd love to see the Republican Party get clobbered, I have some pretty serious concerns that what that's going to tell the Democrats is that all that shit is okay, that they can do pretty much whatever they want short of actually bragging about sexual assault on tape. That's the danger and the failure mode of a two-party system.

Even if Clinton wins by 10 points, I want her, and her party, to see this as a hard-fought race. I want them to recognize that they've got a real problem with young voters (and not just white ones; Joxam makes a fair point that young minority voters are far likelier to vote Clinton than young white voters, but they're still much less likely to vote for her than their elders are) and that it's not going to go away. That just not being Donald Trump may have been enough to win the presidency and (probably) the Senate in 2016, but that it's not a very good long-term strategy.

Of course, the other danger is Democrats being more interested in courting traditionally Republican supporters (read: fiscal conservatives and foreign policy hawks) than making any concessions to the liberal base. I know what I'd put my money on if I were a betting man.

All that said? Yeah, obviously Clinton's better than Trump, her legacy on the Supreme Court will be important (though the odds of her changing its alignment are a bit overblown; the Republicans are going to confirm Merrick Garland about five minutes after she gets elected, unless Obama withdraws his nomination, which I don't think he's likely to do), and she's at least paid lip service toward holding more liberal positions than the ones she's held in the past. I don't hold anything against anybody who'd vote for her (or Johnson, Stein, McMullin, Beard Guy, or really anybody besides Trump). Do what you think is right.

And she's got four years to win me over. If she really does make all the concessions to the liberal base that she's said she will, maybe she'll get my vote next time. But talk is cheap, and she's going to have to back it up with action before I believe her.

Meanwhile, we've got a minimum wage increase and marijuana legalization on the ballot, and Sheriff Joe is down in the polls. As far as a repudiation of the Republican Party, we could do a lot worse than those things.